Dungeon Siege III Being Developed by Obsidian 84
Square Enix has announced that it will be publishing Dungeon Siege III, which is in development at Obsidian Entertainment, makers of Alpha Protocol, Neverwinter Nights 2, and the as yet unfinished Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian will be receiving input from Gas Powered Games, the developer behind the first two installments in the Dungeon Siege series. No release date has been set, but the game is planned for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, and it will include a co-op mode.
Re:Never played DS 1 or 2. Any opinions on them? (Score:4, Informative)
They're ok-ish. Diablo clones, basically, whose only real distinction is that you get control of a full party, rather than the usual individual (with possible AI follower) that you get in the genre. However, I note that this is allegedly going out the window in the third game, so you'll be controlling a single character, as in umpteen other games.
I played the first game to completion, and about half of the second game before I got too bored to continue. The first game started out well, and the whole "no loading screens" thing felt pretty novel at the time; walking into a building or dungeon and having the game transition seemlessly felt pretty novel in the days before WoW (and even WoW has loading screens when changing continent or going into an instance). Early on, it felt pretty fun, with lots of changes in the environment and the terrain. Unfortunately, the game's mid-section is tedious in the extreme, with some very long, highly repetitive dungeons which just seem to go on forever. Things improve somewhat again towards the end, with a few large and extremely epic boss fights, but I'm not sure how many players would make it that far. The game also had a few balance problems; in particular, it was very hard to keep characters levelled up in nature magic (the healing-build) at the same rate as your other characters would be advancing in the offensive skills.
The second game I found it much harder to get into. Despite a generally better and less generic plot, it seemed to have a lot of the flaws of the first game, but amplified further. The early combat areas were monotonous, and maybe it's just me, but I found the difficultly level extremely steep (and while nothing special, I'm not generally bad at this genre). One thing common to both games is that you'll get more out of them if you have somebody to play them co-op with.
So the third game... I don't think I personally will be bothering. It's not a genre I'm head over heels in love with, and with the full-party-control apparently cut, I'd probably wait for Diablo 3 if I wanted to play a click-fest.
Re:Never played DS 1 or 2. Any opinions on them? (Score:1, Informative)
DS1 was pretty good. Very nice graphics (when it came out about 10 years ago). Lacked load screens. It auto-loaded in the background as you traveled. It was pretty much 1 long road you walked down killing things.
Comparable to Diablo, but 3D vs (then, maybe now never played it) Diablo's 2D.
DS2 was not very good. They had removed even the thought of combat tactics. Now you just pointed and your people did their stuff in that general direction. You just watched your people swing and cast spells automatically, according to some AI script you couldn't touch. It felt like the game played itself but required you to keep clicking forward. Truly mindless and not worth touching. By then most other games caught up to it in terms of graphics.
DS2 was the only game where I got into the Beta and decided NOT to buy it because of my Beta experience. It was really bad.
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Maybe I should reinstall DS1. I miss playing RPGs (which this wasn't really), but no longer have the time to get into them. When I have a half hour to play I can't remember what quests I was doing 2 weeks ago and where I was in the them. DS's "on rails" vs. "open world" style removes that depth and the need to remember my task (my task is to kill things in front of me, and enjoy the magic items and scenery). In DS1, you got to control the combat (when to cast spells and who to cast them on); DS2 didn't even let you control that.